In client service departments as commonly found within software companies and the like, a major preoccupation is to provide courteous, efficient and knowledgeable client support in order to improve client satisfaction, thereby improving revenues through maintenance renewal and the purchase of future software offerings. This also provides a powerful “word of mouth” marketing tool as satisfied customers extol others with views of their positive experience with the company. One drawback of existing client support systems is that, although it is relatively easy to find courteous and efficient support staff, knowledgeable support staff are at a premium as an intimate knowledge of the software or product is learned through many months or years of experience with the software or product. Two problems arise from this: 1) that each support staff member becomes a silo of information, i.e. the knowledge they have gained remains in their heads and is not easily accessible by others; and 2) if support staff member leaves the department, or worse, the company itself, that staff member's knowledge also leaves. It is no small task to capture this knowledge and make it accessible to others.
Software companies with customer facing product support, commonly referred to as “tech support”, typically invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and most tech support managers require that their employees enter case notes for every interaction with customers. One of the drawbacks of these large CRM applications is that they do not have the ability to summarize or extract the key knowledge being captured through these interactions.
Additionally, case notes in and of themselves are of little value if they are simply stored in a knowledgebase given that they are typically long and, as in note form, somewhat cryptic. Indeed, many contain many half-sentences, poor grammar and even sensitive client information. As a result, although the cases notes are necessary and are used for many other purposes, attempting to search them and use the knowledge they encapsulate to solve future cases does not provide a viable option.
On the other hand, functionality is often built into CRM software to add knowledgebase articles and the like. However, this is separate from the case notes and a large amount of manual effort is required to read the case notes, summarize them and then write the knowledgebase article. This kind of manual solution therefore comes at a decidedly high cost, and a highly tuned and efficient support team seldom has time to write extensive case notes, let alone summarize them and author knowledgebase articles. Indeed, even if they do have time, there is not a high enough incentive to create a knowledgebase article until one is sure that the issue might happen again in the future and as a result, issues are typically repeated four or five times with the same support employee before an article is created. Even then, the manual effort required and the time constraints placed on support from constant customer demands could mean that the knowledge base article never gets written. As a result, the task of writing knowledge base articles is largely a volunteer one. So while knowledgebase functionality exists, the CRM software does not enable the flow of knowledge from case notes to the knowledgebase.
Still, some companies force their employees to create knowledgebase articles, which typically results in tech support staff spending more time authoring knowledgebase articles, resulting in customers waiting longer for help.
Hybrid CRM and Case Management software solutions do exist and do attempt to meet these needs. However, these solutions typically do a much better job of leveraging knowledgebases to fuel self-service websites and make knowledge more searchable, however there is still a large gap with the conversion of case notes to knowledgebase articles.